Never Forget: Repugs Win Only By Cheating

Whether by the subtle cheat of voter suppression through denying voting rights to felons, as here in Kentucky (how many McGrath supporters could not vote because of a long-ago one-ounce pot possession?), or poll taxes by another name (demanding street addresses from Native Americans in North Dakota) or the blatant daylight theft of votes we're seeing in Georgia and Florida, the story is the same:

Repugs cannot win a fair election.  They have to cheat. If they don't, they lose.

Every single repug "victory" is stolen.  Every single elected repug is illegitimate.

Remember, and pass it on.  They cheated.  They always cheat.

Because they know that when everybody votes, Democrats win.

13 Days

Wisdom from Zandar:

The rest of us have to show up and vote, because there's about a 99% chance guys like Talmadge Strickland will show up and vote.  If we don't, they win every time.  And there's every reason to believe that Americans have been so burnt out by the Trump regime that they just don't see the need to vote, maybe ever and have simply tuned everything out.

So no, I don't buy the big turnout numbers at all.  Like I said a month ago, I'll be shocked if total turnout is above 40%.

But we have to vote or it really won't matter, ever again.

I don't care how many double-digit leads Democratic candidates have in the polls.  Every race is going to be dead close because of repug fuckery.  

Of course repugs are cheating everywhere.  They know that if everybody votes, Democrats win.  They will stop at nothing to prevent Democratic voters from getting to the polls.

The only way we can beat them now is just by overwhelming the polls with every single Democratic, Democratic-leaning, Democratic-curious and Democratic-lapsed voter out there. 

The Resistance: No More Being Nice

Zandar:

So no, the notion that Republicans will turn on Trump even should Mueller or the Senate present evidence of conspiracy or worse is ludicrous.  They will defend Trump even at the cost of their own livelihoods.  The Republican party is nothing more than the racist, misogynist, bigoted cult of personality that worships Trump, and so are all of his voters.

I'm tired of being nice to them.  It's only made them love Trump more.

It's time to call these assholes out this November and throw them out of power for good.  Get registered, get ready, get friends, get to the polls.  At every turn President Obama's open hand was met by fist after fist.

Now it's time to fight.

Stop Letting the GOP Deny All Our Voters

When everybody votes, Democratic candidates win.  If everyone votes, the GOP will never win another election. Anywhere.  And they know it.

The only way repugs can win elections is by election fraud: claiming that non-existent "voter fraud" is a crisis and demands strict ID laws that disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Kentucky has an all-repug state government and semi-strict voter ID laws (non-photo Social Security cards are acceptable).  Don't think bills to shrink the Democratic electorate won't come up in the legislature in January.




Shakezula at LGM:

Like a well-oiled machine that is actually well-oiled.

A new memo from Priorities USA and Civis Analytics provides evidence that voter ID laws successfully disenfranchised voters in 2016.

First, Civis and Priorities performed a simple analysis of how turnout changed in states that adopted voter ID laws between the 2012 and 2016 elections. As the table shows, states that adopted strict turnout laws (MS, VA and WI) saw their turnout drop, while states that did not saw an increase in turnout (this aligns with a similar GAO analysis of voter ID laws).

Civis and Priorities also find that these laws disproportionately harmed black voters, by examining how black turnout changed at the county level between 2012 and 2016. As the table shows, turnout out in counties with a high black population share dropped by 2.2 points in states where ID laws did not change, compared to a 5 point drop in states where a strict ID law was implemented.

I know the current vogue is to set out on quests to capture the votes of the Elucidated & Elusive Guild of Fence Sitters, Middle-Roadsters, Bern Noticers & Goldilockians. But unless the Democratic Party and affiliates are willing to defend the base with all out war against the GOP’s voter suppression efforts we’re going to have 8 years of President tRump abetted by Republican majorities in both Houses, followed by President Worse than tRump abetted by a larger majority of Republicans.

Yes, Trump Is Still Putin's Pawn

This "getting tough on Russia" bullshit is a fake to make it seem that Trump would never have colluded with Putin to win the election.

I think that Putin is holding his promissory notes.  About $10 billion worth.

The Resistanbce: Elections Chief to Lord Dampnut: Prove It

The trumpies are not pursuing their promised "investigation" of non-existent voter fraud, but they should still have to prove their accusation.

 

TPM:

An FEC commissioner repeated her demand Tuesday that the White House provide proof for its claims that thousands of people were bused from Massachusetts into New Hampshire to vote illegally in the 2016 election. She also defied a letter from a Koch brothers-funded group that asked that she be investigated for her actions.

The commissioner made a similar demand for proof last week.

The Real Story on Voter Fraud

TPM: 

TPM has been reporting on this story as one of the central points of our editorial focus for more than fifteen years. I'm proud to say there is probably no issue about which we have more institutional knowledge and few publications that have more institutional knowledge of or experience reporting on this issue.

Voter fraud is extremely rare in the United States. Organized voter fraud (which is basically required to commit fraud at scale) is close to non-existent. And voter impersonation fraud - voting in the name of another person - all but never happens.

(Details you really should read)

That's the story. Voter fraud is close to non-existent in the United States going back more than half a century. When it's brought up, it is almost always to discredit fair elections or with the political agenda of making it hard to vote. The folks who push this are liars.

Read the whole thing,

Illegitimate and Racist Aren't the Half of It

Scott Lemieux at LGM:

So an institutional mechanism designed to overrepresent slaveholders, with a major assist from the FBI, installed an overt racist as president. I’d say American constitutionalism seems very robust right now.

The crucial question is not why John Lewis isn’t treating Trump as legitimate, but why other prominent Democrats are.

GOP Won By Stripping Democracy from American States

When everybody votes, Democrats win.  When Democrats allow repugs to prevent millions of people from voting, the GOP takes power.

We're not going to restore democracy by pandering to racist motherfucking trump voters.  We're going to restore democracy by reversing voter suppression and making sure everyone votes.  Because when everyone votes, Democrats win.

Zandar:

Remember when I said that GOP gerrymandering made election districts so ridiculously unfair that North Carolina no longer qualified as a democracy? 

 

SNIP

Well, it turns out plenty of other Republican-controlled states are just as dismal as NC in the voting district boundaries department, and actually worse overall in election integrity as a Pennsylvania newspaper points out.

SNIP

The states as bad or worse than NC overall include Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the Badger State under Scott Walker would be dead last except for Arizona.)  Wisconsin rated 8/100 on voting district boundaries, and Ohio a dismal 10.  Please note that these are all states that have passed GOP "voter ID laws" and were gerrymandered by Republican legislatures after 2010.  They are also all states that Trump won.

The fact of the matter is that this is what cost Clinton the election: states that are no longer free democracies and instead weighted heavily towards the GOP.  More so than Trump's cult of personality, more so than race, more so than Russian interference, this is why Clinton lost.

We're no longer a collection of democratic states.

The Resistance: How the Minority Party Cheats

Political Animal:

This is the kind of thing Zachary Roth was referring to when he wrote:

Today’s conservatives have no such confidence that the people are on their side. In fact, they are beginning to perceive that they’re in the minority – perhaps more glaringly than ever before. And yet this realization has brought with it another more hopeful one: being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.

Roth goes on to describe the various assaults on democracy that are being embraced by Republicans in order to avoid losing, even in the minority. Doug Muder wrote about about how these attacks on our democratic institutions are fueled by igniting a confederate insurgency:

The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries…

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

Pumpkin-Headed Moron Gets Election Backward: Repugs Stopped Millions of Citizens From Voting

Remember, everything the fascist tangelo says is lies and stupidity.

D.R. Tucker at Political Animal:

Considering the controversy over oddities in Ohio during the 2004 Presidential election, there’s nothing wrong with being a little skeptical about just how decisively the Donald won the Electoral College. Investigative journalist Greg Palast observes that the playing field was rigged–in Trump’s favor–long before November 8:

Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.

The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report, “The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters” [which was published in August 2016].

On [Election Day], we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted…

This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough [right-wing] white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on. It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

How to Rig An Election

Sure, it'll be easy!

Shakezula at LGM:

As CrunchyFrog demonstrated last night, it wouldn’t.

I know they’re all grifters, but man are they stupid, too. He actually thinks that Democrats are bussing (sic) in black people to vote multiple times in different precincts. This reminds me of an article once by a journalist who went undercover for a few months as a car salesman. He had the usual exposes about the car dealership industry, but one side comment was about how every sales dude (almost always dudes) was also involved in some multi-level-marketing scam or another and how their best customers were the other sales dudes. Gullible is as gullible does.

Regarding the black voter busing scheme. Let’s think about this logically (not possible for the GOP, I know, but bear with me). If I were running such a scheme what would I have to do to make an effective dent in the results? As a starting point, a lot of Colorado wingnuts think that Obama won there in 2012 by cheating. He won by 138k votes, so let’s use 140k votes as a starting point. So let’s say I have a bus full of black voters – say 66 people (common capacity limit on school buses). So if every bus is filled to near capacity that’s about 2200 bus-visits to the polling stations. How many polling stations can a given bus hit in a day? Well, your typical precinct has 2-3 people checking voters in and each one processes about 2 per minute, so that’s over 30 minutes just to check in (of course there will be other voters, too), plus time to drive between precincts. Seriously, if you are counting on more than 10 precincts per bus per day you’re going to be disappointed. So that’s 220 buses chartered for the day, and a total of about 14k fraudulent voters.

Holy freaking crap. The logistical problems of arranging that many fraudulent voters, ALL of whom are risking felony sentences and NONE of whom have ever talked about it to anyone. Now plan to arrange for 140k fake registrations using the matching photos for each person and arrange it so that the manager of each bus makes sure that every voter gets the exact fake ID for each precinct. And NO MISTAKES – remember no one has ever been caught doing this because Democrats, who are inept in government, are utter geniuses when it comes to vote fraud. So that means there NEVER can be a situation where a fake voter encounters a registrar who says “Hey, I live on that street, I’ve never seen you” or similar.

By the way, the absolutely easiest logistical part of this scheme is arranging for photo ID. Assuming you have that many people willing to commit felonies for whatever you are paying them and have arranged everything else in detail, getting fake photo IDs for them is simple and routine. So photo ID laws do absolutely jack shit to stop massive vote fraud – but of course that wasn’t their real intention, was it?

And when the O’Keefe’s find nothing we need not worry – all wingnuts everywhere will remain convinced that it is happening everywhere.

 No, wait - that's not the plan.  The plan is to scare so many white people about non-existent voter fraud that they install voting restrictions specifically designed to prevent all Democratic-leaning groups from voting at all.

Yeah, that's how it works. 

Appeals Court Exposes NC Legislators for the Racist Motherfuckers They Are

I imagine Notorious RBG, Kagan and Sotomayor reading this opinion over cocktails, shouting out their favorite parts and just licking their chops at the prospect of North Carolina daring to appeal to the Supremes.

One of the main plaintiffs in the case is Rev. William Barber's North Carolina NAACP.  This enormous victory coming the morning after his paint-stripping speech at the DNC is the definition of righteousness.

TPM:

A three-judge panel of the U.S Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has found North Carolina's controversial GOP-backed voting restrictions were intended to discriminate against African American voters.

The Friday ruling is a huge win for voting rights activists in a closely watched case in a potential 2016 swing state. The appeals court reversed the ruling of a district court siding with the state.

SNIP

It permanently blocked provisions in a 2013 North Carolina law that required certain photo IDs to vote, limited early voting, eliminated same day registration, ended out-of-precinct voting and prohibited pre-registration of young voters.

In the opinion, the panel of judges said that the law restricted voting in ways that "disproportionately affected African Americans" and that its provisions targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision." It said the state's defense of the law was "meager."

"Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the state’s true motivation," the opinion said.

It noted that the legislation was passed as African American voter turnout had expanded to almost the rates of whites, and that the legislature enacted the legislation after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had required North Carolina to seek federal approval for changes to its voting policies. The appeals court -- citing a lower court's findings -- pointed out that state lawmakers sought data breaking down voting practices by race. The judges said that the law's provisions singled out the practices disproportionately popular among African Americans, such as preregisteration and provisional voting.

SNIP

The appeals court declined the request of the challengers to put North Carolina back under "preclearance" -- the requirement for federal approval of voting laws in certain states that was partially dismantled by the Supreme Court in 2013 -- as is allowed by Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act when discriminatory intent is found. The appeals court said the remedy was "rarely used" and "not necessary" in this case.

The fuck it's not necessary.  Put that state back in Voting Rights Act jail and throw away the key.  That's the only way to keep them from doing it again and the only way to put other states on notice not to Even. Fucking. Try. It.

It took the challengers two years to stop this massive, blatant disenfranchisement, during which time hundreds of thousands of voters were died their civil rights. 

If and when we ever get a Voting Rights Act with teeth, it needs to include jail time for the perpetrators. 

Also, somebody tell Nate Silver to put North Carolina back in the Likely Dem category.

Fifty Years of Voting Rights, and It's Just Getting Harder

Kentucky may not demand photo ID, but it still makes it next to impossible for anyone who works or doesn't have a car to get to the polls during the 12 hours on Election Day that is the only time you can vote.

And is Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, running for re-election, making easing Kentucky's voting restrictions part of her platform?  Is gubernatorial candidate Jack Conway or attorney general candidate Andy "I Shill for MotherFrackers" Beshear?

They are not.  Repugs with Ds next to their names, all of 'em.

Ed Kilgore:

Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And since said act was largely vitiated by a conservative majority of SCOTUS in 2013, and congressional Republicans have barely lifted any fingers to restore it, the president’s going to do everything possible to force voting rights into the national consciousness that day, and perhaps even into the GOP debate, as reported by The Hill’s Jordan Fabian:

President Obama will call for the restoration of the Voting Rights Act on its 50th anniversary Thursday, the White House said.

Obama will hold a teleconference to commemorate the landmark legislation and call for its renewal, following a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that voided one of its central provisions.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who rose to prominence in the 1960s as a civil rights leader, will participate.

The event will allow Obama to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans, many of whom argue some provisions of the 1965 law went too far. It will take place on the same day as the first GOP presidential primary debate.

Also in no coincidence, there's a new book out on voting rights.

In Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, journalist Ari Berman looks not just at the significance of this landmark civil rights law, but at what's happened to voting right in America since Lyndon Johnson signed the VRA in 1965.

Rolling Stone recently spoke to Berman about his new book, the trauma of the 2000 Florida recount and what the gutting of the VRA means for the upcoming presidential election.

Kentucky Flunks Democracy

If democracy is government of, by and for the people.

Via Kevin Drum, the Center for American Progress ranked the 50 states and the District of Columbia on the state of democracy in each, based on how easy it is for citizens to participate in their own government.

Kentucky ranks 48th, just ahead of Tennessee, Virginia and Alabama. Worse than Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas.  Worse even than voter suppression / election fraud centers Florida and Arizona.

Kentucky gets an F on ballot access, F on political representation in state government and D+ on influence on the political system.  

Hard to argue with that grade once you know the metrics that compose each category.

Accessibility of the ballot:

 

•Availability of preregistration

•Availability of online voter registration

•Availability of portable voter registration

•Availability of in-person early voting

•Availability of no-fault absentee voting

•Voter ID laws

•Voting wait time, 2008 and 2012

•Provisional balloting rate, 2008 and 2012

•Participation in the Interstate Crosscheck system

•Motor Voter implementation performance

Big fat zippo for Kentucky on everyone one of those.

Representation in state government

 

•Felony disenfranchisement laws

•Ballot initiative laws

•District distortion

•Female elected representation

•Communities of color elected representation

Another obese zero.

Influence in the political system

 

•Campaign contribution limits for individual donors

•Availability of public campaign financing

•Campaign disclosure laws

•Revolving door bans

•Open legislative data

•Judicial recusal laws

D+ on this only because Kentucky limits individual donations and bans corporation donations.

Wondering how to judge state senate and house candidates next year?  Ask them what they are going to do specifically to increase actual democracy in Kentucky, based on these metrics.

Repug Elected = Voter Suppression = Cheating = Fraud by Repugs

Every motherfucking one of them. Frauds. Disqualified. Not fit for office.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

So much has happened in so many parts of the judicial system regarding Voter ID and other recent efforts to restrict the franchise that it’s hard to get a fix on the big picture. But at the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has seen the future of SCOTUS action on voting rights in its rulings on Wisconsin (halting implementation on grounds of timing) and Texas (giving that state the green light) Voter ID laws, and it’s not good:

The Wisconsin and Texas rulings were just preliminary requests for emergency relief, and the Supreme Court may yet hear the cases in full on the merits. But there seems little chance that a majority of the current Court will rein in these changes in any significant way. In courtrooms around the country, it’s been made clear that these Republican initiatives have been designed and implemented to disenfranchise Democrats (again, usually of color). But the Supreme Court doesn’t care.

So Toobin thinks it’s time to make a mental adjustment back to the mid-1960s, when hostile state laws and practices on voting were overwhelmed by sheer the sheer moral and physical presence of people exercising the rights they still had and participating in elections whatever the difficulty:

Certainly, the obstacles for voters in the contemporary South do not compare to those that the civil-rights pioneers, black and white, faced until the early nineteen-sixties. In the Freedom Summer of 1964, the still nascent civil-rights movement coalesced around an effort to register voters in Mississippi. It was during that summer that the infamous murders of the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner took place. In addition, of course, black Mississippi residents endured less well-known but equally horrific abuse from state authorities during this time.​ In those days before the Voting Rights Act, the effort did not succeed in registering great numbers of voters, but it did focus the nation’s attention on the magnitude of the problem.

So it could today. In light of the changes in the state laws, it’s difficult but not impossible to register voters and make sure that they get to cast their ballots. And it’s absolutely mandatory in a democracy for that to be done.

The title of Toobin’s essay is “Freedom Summer, 2015.” It’s sobering to realize that’s what we may need to restore voting rights long thought to be relatively secure. But it’s also a reminder that reactionaries who fear democracy (not just judicial conservatives, but the Con Cons who think “losers” have forfeited the right to have any say in what “winners” do with their money and power) have been defeated before in more more extreme circumstances.

 See also Think Progress on court-allowed voter suppression and Lawyers, Guns and Money on purging voters of color from voting lists.

QOTD: Voting

Zandar:

If voting doesn't matter, why are Republicans trying so hard to stop people from doing it?

The Only Real Vote Fraudsters Are Repugs

How much more proof do you need that every accusation repugs make is either a lie or projection?

Political Animal:

If you want to see some actual voter fraud, perhaps you should forget about Mississippi and look at a documented case in Wisconsin, via this report from Bruce Vielmetti of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (h/t Crooks & Liars):

A Shorewood man has been charged with more than a dozen counts of illegal voting, accused of casting multiple ballots in four elections in 2011 and 2012, including five in the 2012 gubernatorial recall.

Robert D. Monroe, 50, used addresses in Shorewood, Milwaukee and Indiana, according to the complaint, and cast some votes in the names of his son and his girlfriend’s son.

Was Monroe perhaps an Alinsky disciple operating under secret instructions from ACORN? No.

Monroe was considered by investigators to be the most prolific multiple voter in memory. He was a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker and state Sen. Alberta Darling, both Republicans, and allegedly cast five ballots in the June 2012 election in which Walker survived a recall challenge.

Now that’s some “voter enthusiasm.” And for those willing to break the law, then I’m wrong in saying “enthusiasm” doesn’t get you any additional votes unless it’s contagious.

If You Vote Democratic, Repugs Are Going to Prevent You From Voting

I'm going to keep telling this story until Kentucky gets rid of voter-fucking-ID:  For decades in Kentucky, all you had to do to vote was show up, sign the voter book next to your signature from the last time you voted, and then vote. Done. No fraud, no question, no problem.

But that was back before repugs realized that letting everybody vote meant that repugs lost elections.

Zandar:

“The right to vote — what kind of political platform is that? Why would you make that a part of your agenda, preventing people from voting? How can you defend that?” Obama said. “This recent effort to restrict the vote has not been led by both parties. It’s being led by the Republican Party.”

That last paragraph there is the best case yet anyone in this administration has put forth as to what the true nature of the GOP voter ID effort really is:  voter suppression in order to lower turnout of traditionally Democratic voting groups.  For President Obama to publicly acknowledge this and then publicly rebuke the GOP for doing it (he later recounted the whole birther nonsense and had a good laugh along with the audience) was not only necessary but vital to our voting system.

Long-time readers will know that I harp on voting and voting rights weekly in this space.  There's a reason for that.  It's literally the last gasp of the current Republican party, the last weapon they have in order to stay in power.  They talk of "outreach" and "reconciliation" with minority groups, particularly black and Latino voters, and then make it harder for all voters to vote in a way that falls most on the shoulders of voters of color.

So to hear the President call the GOP out on this is nothing short of historic.  We need to make sure that we exercise that vote, so the people trying to take that right away do not gain more political power.

Here's the video of the speech:

Here's An Easy Question for You, Alison: Who Should Vote?

Should be an easy question, given that you are the sitting, elected Secretary of State of Kentucky and the person who literally decides who gets to vote and when and how. Should be even easier given that you are challenging sitting U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell for re-election, and the more people who vote the more likely you are to beat him. So ... what do you think?

I say everybody should vote: every repug, every freakazoid, every moron, every convicted criminal, every teabagger, every racist motherfucker out there.

Let's find out once and for all if they really are the majority, if they've really got more votes than all the fags and the sluts and the nii**ers and the messicans and the muslins and the commies and all the other demonrat-voting moochers.

But it won't ever happen. Because the repugs know damn good and well they haven't got the numbers to fill Rupp Arena for the 2014 Season Memorial Ceremony, much less the numbers to win dog catcher in tiny Robertson County, population, two thousand one hundred and eight-eight.

Steve M.

You and I may think that the Roberts Court's decision in the McCutcheon case to give obscenely rich people yet another way to buy elections is an affront to American values. But if you're a right-winger, it's a necessary bulwark against the biggest inherent risk of democracy: the possibility that citizens will actually vote.

You have to understand that that prospect terrifies the right. Right-wingers think that voters inevitably vote to give themselves the right to be more and more parasitical, until the moment arrives when society itself is unsustainable.

SNIP

If you believe this -- if you believe that the benefit-receiving, hammock-dwelling rabble just vote to take and take and take, heedless of the imminent collapse of civilization that they're bringing about, then of course you want as much money as possible in the electoral system -- it's a counterweight to the sans-culotte barbarians at the gate. Minimizing the impact of universal suffrage is vitally necessary in order to prevent the have-nots from draining the life out of the nation. One way of doing this, of course, is by limiting the franchise. The Nation's Ari Berman is one of many people to see a connection between two impulses of this Court:

The Supreme Court's Ideology: More Money, Less Voting

In the past four years, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has made it far easier to buy an election and far harder to vote in one.

First came the Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which brought us the Super PAC era.

Then came the Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act.

Now we have McCutcheon v. FEC, where the Court, in yet another controversial 5-4 opinion written by Roberts, struck down the limits on how much an individual can contribute to candidates, parties and political action committees. So instead of an individual donor being allowed to give $117,000 to campaigns, parties and PACs in an election cycle (the aggregate limit in 2012), they can now give up to $3.5 million....

Elected Republicans limit the franchise as well, of course, via voter ID laws and voter-roll purges.

This is what you do if you think democracy, left unchecked, will ultimately kill America. And that is what the right believes.

I'm a believer in pure Democracy: everybody votes, and the group with the most votes wins, and gets the prize.

Even if the group I think will destroy the world gets the most votes, I figure they'll get voted out as soon as things get bad, and a better group gets a chance to do its thing.

Because repugs and I share a dirty little secret: when everybody votes, repugs lose.

How about you, Alison? You want everybody to vote? Or you want the group with the most money to win?